Legacy Letter May 2012

21 February 2017, Dear Friends and Fellow Laborers, “TRIP TO BURMA” Gloria and I have returned from Myanmar (Burma) and have great things to report. First of all, I would like to relay that the Church of God is continuing to better organize in Burma. Burma has been a backwater for the Church of God for many years; indeed, it has been an adjunct to Australia and continues to be for some COG organizations. Part of the problem has been a lack of trained leadership for the fledgling churches that have sprung up over the years in many parts of Burma.

Dear Friends and Fellow Laborers, The following is from the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . .’ The purpose of what is known as the Establishment Clause was to prevent government from establishing a state religion and to prevent the government from interfering with a citizen’s religious beliefs. Nowhere does it say that religion must be taken out of government. The purpose of the clause was not to take religion out of government, but to keep government out of religion.

Dear Friends and Fellow Laborers, Mr. Herbert W. Armstrong met King Bhumibol Adulyadej the first time in 1971. At that time, the king told him about a new project to educate the ethnic hill tribes that inhabited the highland border region of northern Thailand. These hill tribes grew opium and sold it to Chinese middle-men as their only cash crop. The king wanted to teach them to grow other crops, such as peaches and vegetables, to replace the opium they grew. This would be more profitable for the hill tribes and much less destructive to the upland forests and humanity as a whole. The king also wanted to give their children an education but had very few trained teachers.